Spam!

Do you suffer from Internet spam messages sent to your email or web platform?
Unlike traditional Spam (pictured at left), spam in the form of comments submitted to the blogs at Voices.com has been rampant.
An increased volume in spam sent to our comments box has prompted this posting, and if you’ve been commenting on the blog but have not seen your comments published, your comments may have been caught in our spam filter.
Learn more about what we are doing and how you can help in today’s VOX Daily.

Where’s My Comment?

Recently I answered an email from someone who was concerned that all of the effort they had gone to commenting on the blog a couple days back was unappreciated. Yikes!
If your comments have not appeared on the blog in recent weeks, be assured that your comments are appreciated. There is a technical issue preventing many valid comments from getting into the approval queue and thus being as categorized as spam.

How Much Spam?

Every couple of weeks I empty the spam, purging the system of thousands of spam comments. To give you an idea, there is at least one spam comment being sent to the blogs every 3 minutes. Scary, I know.

Whenever a number of comments are submitted in a given time period, the system starts to treat them as though they are all spam, sensing an attack. The sheer volume of spam comments being sent to Voices.com via the blog right now is preventing valid comments from getting through. Essentially, valid comments are being treated as Spam if they are being submitted while the blog is being spammed.
Other comments that get in the spam filter are comments that contain more than one link in the comment itself.

Rescue Missions

This morning I went back to some of the oldest trapped spam messages from January 3rd, 2011 and was able rescue 2 comments that were not spam at all. All of the published comments to do with how to protect your hearing were rescued this morning from the Spam filter.

I do my best to rescue valid comments regularly but you can imagine how trying this has been. We love to hear from you and don’t want to miss any of your contributions to the discussion!

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Voices.com. Classically trained in voice, piano, violin and musical theatre, as well as a respected mentor and industry speaker, Stephanie graduated with a Bachelor of Musical Arts from the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario. Possessing a great love for imparting knowledge and empowering others, her blog serves an audience that wants to achieve excellence in storytelling through the power of the human voice. Stephanie was recently listed on the PROFIT Magazine W100 list three times (2013, 2015 and 2016), a ranking of Canada's top female entrepreneurs, and is the author of Voice Acting for Dummies®.

I find the â€˜Captchaâ€™ system (asking you to spell distorted letters) to be annoying, but a simple question for each commenter to answer, like â€œWhat is 2+2?â€ or â€œWhat color is this text?â€ before they post, should lock out the auto-spammers. I donâ€™t know how complicated it would be to add this to the commenting system, but thought Iâ€™d make the suggestion.
Thanks,
Stacy